I've been meaning to tackle
Roger & Me for a while, in part because it's current blu is... a little off? It's really exactly what I'm here to write about. Plus, just as a fascinating documentary, it's earned its way onto my list of films that I feel ultimately ought be covered on this site at some point anyway. But I know
Michael Moore rubs a lot of people the wrong way, and having tried to sit through
Slacker Uprising ten or so years ago, believe me I get it. And I'm reluctant to run any of you guys off. But
Roger & Me really is a killer film, and hey, looking at our current political situation, there really couldn't be a better time to put it up on the examination table and poke.
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2003 US Warner Bros DVD top; 2014 US Warner Bros BD bottom. |
Not that
Roger & Me is a #BlackLivesMatter film, being from 1989. And Moore's sites are definitely focused on class rather than race. But issues of race and class are indelibly intertwined around these parts, and it's hard not to notice that most of the families we watch get evicted in this film are black. The locals who the rich townies hire to act as "living statues" at their Gatsby party all seem to be black. The man we see get shot dead in the street by police is certainly black. I'm sure Moore would say that he's covering people of every race, gender, etc, because all of the working class are being exploited by the same small percent of the population. And its in everybody's best interests to unite and identify as one large collective that needs to rise up rather then splinter off into separate factions fending for themselves. And I'd agree. But at the same time, this film definitely illustrates the huge problems born out of the clear systemic failure to recognize that black lives in fact matter.
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Of course, this film is important because of how it popularized documentaries. Moore's determination to inject humor to give it broad appeal, and the very "meta" way he made the struggle of making the movie a defining part of the story itself made it one of the most influential documentaries of all time. But an even more important reason why it holds up to this day, and why Moore's later work seems to fall further and further short of the watermark this
Roger & Me left, is that it's such a raw, personal film. He's an amateur filmmaker at this point, gathering and sharing the stories of the people in his own hometown. He's not (at least at this point) some celebrity pundit who breezes into town asking "what's going on here?" and injecting himself into the story. He grew up in Flint, his grandfather was in the famous sit-down strike they're celebrating. His "grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins" all worked for General Motors. He runs into a high school classmate losing his home while following the deputy sheriff conducting evictions. When the GM public relations officer tells him to leave because the plant closing is a private moment, he's being sincere when he says it's his community and he has as much right as anybody to be in there. So it's all very personal, making each tragic moment that much more of a gut punch.
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Everything is justified here. Even the music in the soundtrack - they play
Pat Boone because General Motors would hire him to sing to their employees for decades, and the final montage set to
The Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" is all the more poignant because we just heard a former factory worker talk about having to hear it while having his nervous breakdown. And unlike his more recent work (and I'm not even counting things like
Trumpland, which is literally a lecture), it's not a polemic instructing us what to think. Obviously, like every film ever, he has a subjective point of view and he presents everything his way; but in
Roger & Me, he doesn't really talk to the people who he supports like underdog union leaders or experts he hired to voice his opinions. In
Where To Invade Next, he basically parades a bunch of pre-interviewed sympathizers from each country to tell the camera what he thinks, and it's boring as hell. In
Capitalism: A Love Story, I'm pretty sure the only reason they talk to
Wallace Shawn is because they got friendly during the making of
Canadian Bacon, and they realized they agreed with each other on everything. Here, these are clearly, at least mostly, on-the-spot investigative interviews, letting GM officials, laid off workers and everyone else say their piece, and clearly being surprised where some of that leads. He doesn't contradict them or add over-riding narration insisting who we should vote for. Of course all filmmaking is an act of manipulation, and Moore isn't shy about his opinions, but there's still room left for us to draw our own conclusions. I wonder if it would even be possible for him to make another film like that today?
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Well, Warner Bros originally released
Roger & Me on DVD in one of their classic "crapper snapper" cases back in 2003. Then, eleven years later, they released it on blu as a "25th Anniversary Edition." A gritty, mostly hand-held 16mm film doesn't sound like a top priority for double-dipping to HD, but
a Tumble announcement from Moore himself let us know that this was "a full 4K digital restoration from my original 16mm negative." So we should expect some noticeable change. Well, do you notice anything different about these sets of shots?
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It's pretty hard to miss! Let's start with the most obvious: the aspect ratio. The DVD is a full 1.33:1 (same as the old laserdisc), while the blu is perfectly 16x9 at 1.78:1. It seems to largely be an open/ closed matte situation, with the blu-ray vertically cropping a lot of the image. But if you look carefully, you'll see that the blu has also revealed a little more information along the sides, which is certainly a good sign. Still, a lot of this doc includes footage taken from 4:3 television programs (mostly news, natch), and definitely looks mis-framed and overly cropped on the blu. Even the original footage looks a little tight. What was the original, intended AR? Well,
looking it up on the imdb (which, as a database maintained by the open public, is not a perfectly reliable source, but at least gives us some data to work with), they say it's 1.66:1. So both discs are off, and the ideal is somewhere in the middle?
It may be anybody's guess, as Moore talks on these discs about how this was his first film project, he'd never gone to school, and began filming without "knowing what I was doing." A lot of footage turned out to be unusable and was left out, while what is in the film was shot by different operators at different times. So I'm not sure if Moore even has a definitive idea of what the film's actual aspect ratio is. Unless someone who worked on this film cares to weigh in on the issue, I can only say the full-/ wide-screen issue has to come down to consumers' personal preference. Speaking just for myself, I tend to prefer the fullscreen overall, but it varies shot to shot.
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The second thing I notice is the green push; like when Criterion was
going through that period... To be fair, the DVD's master may've gone a bit pink, but then I'd say they've over-corrected. Still, it's not too bad, and less obvious when you don't have DVD snapshots up on the screen at the same time. You don't put it on your TV and say, boy is that green. But Michael Moore's shirt, and that parade flag in the previous set of comparisons should probably be true white. But on the up-side, this is a true HD transfer, with clearer detail and cleaner edges. You can only read that worker's "Shop Rat" shirt on the blu, so it really is a genuine advancement in resolution. The DVD retains some grain, but a lot of that is actually smudgy compression artifacts on closer inspection. The BD cleans all of that up, too.
For the audio, the DVD gives us the original mono in Dolby Digital with optional English, Spanish and French subs. Disappointingly, Warner's blu-ray audio is still a lossy Dolby Digital track. They do add a couple more language options: German and Spanish dubs, plus German and Japanese subs in addition to the English, Spanish and French. But the lossy audio is a bummer, and an unexpected one.
Extras-wise, we get an audio commentary by Michael Moore and a fullscreen trailer. I was surprised to discover that the commentary differs across the two releases. Moore mostly tells all the same facts and anecdotes, but they're totally different recordings made many years apart. The original DVD commentary is a little stiffer, with some awkward pauses particularly in the beginning. On the new blu-ray commentary, Moore sounds a little more relaxed and smoother, but on the other hand, he now falls into the trap of describing what's obvious on screen. So it's hard to pick a real winner, and there's not enough unique content in either one to make it worth running out and tracking down the other. Honestly, it just feels like a wasted effort to replace the old commentary, but it's not a step backwards or anything. Just an arbitrary change.
I really wish they'd used the opportunity to instead include Moore's short sequel to
Roger & Me,
Pets or Meat: The Return To Flint. It's a great, roughly half-hour doc that has Moore revisiting his hometown and following up on almost everybody from the original film three years later. It was made for PBS television, and retains both the humor and heft of
Roger & Me. No viewing even really feels complete now without
Pets Or Meat, but we're not left with any respectable option. I've got a DV-R of a VHS rip I downloaded off the internet over a decade ago. Meanwhile, neither release is exactly hurting for disc space.
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I don't know how tough PBS is with their licensing, maybe Warners tried to get
Pets Or Meat. But the lossy audio? That's highly unusual for Warner Bros. In some ways, it feels like a cheap release (and literally speaking, its MSRP was pretty affordable)... maybe they did the restoration hoping Criterion would knock on their door hoping to put together a more lavish special edition? I'm certainly hoping for that anyway.
Roger & Me is an essential film, so I'm glad we've got this; but it feels like a stop-gap release, and I hope someday I'll be double-dipping.
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